The link between the two has been talked about for years, but a causal connection had never been proven. For the first time, University of Pennsylvania research based on experimental data connects Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram use to decreased well-being. Psychologist Melissa G. Hunt published her findings in the December Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

Few prior studies have attempted to show that social-media use harms users’ well-being, and those that have either put participants in unrealistic situations or were limited in scope, asking them to completely forego Facebook and relying on self-report data, for example, or conducting the work in a lab in as little time as an hour.

“We set out to do a much more comprehensive, rigorous study that was also more ecologically valid,” says Hunt, associate director of clinical training in Penn’s Psychology Department.

To that end, the research team, which included recent alumni Rachel Marx and Courtney Lipson and Penn senior Jordyn Young, designed their experiment to include the three platforms most popular with a cohort of undergraduates, and then collected objective usage data automatically tracked by iPhones for active apps, not those running the background.

Each of 143 participants completed a survey to determine mood and well-being at the study’s start, plus shared shots of their iPhone battery screens to offer a week’s worth of baseline social-media data. Participants were then randomly assigned to a control group, which had users maintain their typical social-media behavior, or an experimental group that limited time on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to 10 minutes per platform per day.

For the next three weeks, participants shared iPhone battery screenshots to give the researchers weekly tallies for each individual. With those data in hand, Hunt then looked at seven outcome measures including fear of missing out, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

“Here’s the bottom line,” she says. “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study.”

Hunt stresses that the findings do not suggest that 18- to 22-year-olds should stop using social media altogether. In fact, she built the study as she did to stay away from what she considers an unrealistic goal. The work does, however, speak to the idea that limiting screen time on these apps couldn’t hurt.

“It is a little ironic that reducing your use of social media actually makes you feel less lonely,” she says. But when she digs a little deeper, the findings make sense. “Some of the existing literature on social media suggests there’s an enormous amount of social comparison that happens. When you look at other people’s lives, particularly on Instagram, it’s easy to conclude that everyone else’s life is cooler or better than yours.”

Because this particular work only looked at Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, it’s not clear whether it applies broadly to other social-media platforms. Hunt also hesitates to say that these findings would replicate for other age groups or in different settings. Those are questions she still hopes to answer, including in an upcoming study about the use of dating apps by college students.

Despite those caveats, and although the study didn’t determine the optimal time users should spend on these platforms or the best way to use them, Hunt says the findings do offer two related conclusions it couldn’t hurt any social-media user to follow.

For one, reduce opportunities for social comparison, she says. “When you’re not busy getting sucked into clickbait social media, you’re actually spending more time on things that are more likely to make you feel better about your life.” Secondly, she adds, because these tools are here to stay, it’s incumbent on society to figure out how to use them in a way that limits damaging effects. “In general, I would say, put your phone down and be with the people in your life.”

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Melissa G. Hunt is the associate director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rachel Marx and Courtney Lipson graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.

Jordyn Young is a member of the University of Pennsylvania Class of 2019.

People who have fond memories of childhood, specifically their relationships with their parents, tend to have better health, less depression and fewer chronic illnesses as older adults, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“We know that memory plays a huge part in how we make sense of the world–how we organize our past experiences and how we judge how we should act in the future. As a result, there are a lot of different ways that our memories of the past can guide us,” said William J. Chopik, PhD, from Michigan State University and lead author of the study. “We found that good memories seem to have a positive effect on health and well-being, possibly through the ways that they reduce stress or help us maintain healthy choices in life.”

The findings were published in the journal Health Psychology.

Previous research has shown a positive relationship between good memories and good health in young adults, including higher quality of work and personal relationships, lower substance use, lower depression and fewer health problems, according to Chopik. He and his co-author, Robin Edelstein, PhD, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wanted to see how this would apply to older adults.

Also, much of the existing research focused on mothers and rarely examined the role of fathers in child development. Chopik and Edelstein sought to expand on the existing studies to include participants’ reflections of their relationships with both parents.

The researchers used data from two nationally representative samples, the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States and the Health and Retirement Study, with a total of more than 22,000 participants. The first study followed adults in their mid-40s for 18 years and the second followed adults 50 and over for six years. The surveys included questions about perceptions of parental affection, overall health, chronic conditions and depressive symptoms.

Participants in both groups who reported remembering higher levels of affection from their mothers in early childhood experienced better physical health and fewer depressive symptoms later in life. Those who reported memories with more support from their fathers also experienced fewer depressive symptoms, according to Chopik.

“The most surprising finding was that we thought the effects would fade over time because participants were trying to recall things that happened sometimes over 50 years ago. One might expect childhood memories to matter less and less over time, but these memories still predicted better physical and mental health when people were in middle age and older adulthood,” said Chopik.

There was a stronger association in people who reported a more loving relationship with their mothers, noted Chopik, but that might change.

“These results may reflect the broader cultural circumstances of the time when the participants were raised because mothers were most likely the primary caregivers,” said Edelstein. “With shifting cultural norms about the role of fathers in caregiving, it is possible that results from future studies of people born in more recent years will focus more on relationships with their fathers.”

Chopik and Edelstein found that participants with positive childhood memories also had fewer chronic conditions in the first study of 7,100 people, but not in the second study of 15,200, making the results less straightforward

###

That may be because chronic conditions such as diabetes, thyroid disease and high blood pressure were rare in both samples, said Chopik. Future studies in this area could focus more closely on childhood memories in older adults with chronic conditions.

Article: “Retrospective Memories of Parental Care and Health from Mid to Late Life,” by William J. Chopik, PhD, Michigan State University, and Robin S. Edelstein, PhD, University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor. Health Psychology. Published November 5, 2018.

Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and at

]]>https://theedwire.com/health/childhood-memories/feed/03154Children’s sleep not significantly affected by screen time, new study findshttps://theedwire.com/health/childrens-sleep-screens/
https://theedwire.com/health/childrens-sleep-screens/#respondTue, 06 Nov 2018 07:18:32 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3151Screen-time has little impact on the quality of children’s sleep, according to new Oxford University.]]>

Screen-time has little impact on the quality of children’s sleep, according to new Oxford University research.

Screens are now a fixture of modern childhood. And as young people spend an increasing amount of time on electronic devices, the effects of these digital activities has become a prevalent concern among parents, caregivers, and policy-makers. Research indicating that between 50% to 90% of school-age children might not be getting enough sleep has prompted calls that technology use may be to blame. However, the new research findings from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, has shown that screen time has very little practical effect on children’s sleep.

The study was conducted using data from the United States’ 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health. Parents from across the country completed self-report surveys on themselves, their children and household.

“The findings suggest that the relationship between sleep and screen use in children is extremely modest,” says Professor Andrew Przybylski, author of the study published in the Journal of Pediatrics. “Every hour of screen time was related to 3 to 8 fewer minutes of sleep a night.”

In practical terms, while the correlation between screen time and sleep in children exists, it might be too small to make a significant difference to a child’s sleep. For example, when you compare the average nightly sleep of a tech-abstaining teenager (at 8 hours, 51 minutes) with a teenager who devotes 8 hours a day to screens (at 8 hours, 21 minutes), the difference is overall inconsequential. Other known factors, such as early starts to the school day, have a larger effect on childhood sleep.

“This suggests we need to look at other variables when it comes to children and their sleep,” says Przybylski. Analysis in the study indicated that variables within the family and household were significantly associated with both screen use and sleep outcomes. “Focusing on bedtime routines and regular patterns of sleep, such as consistent wake-up times, are much more effective strategies for helping young people sleep than thinking screens themselves play a significant role.”

The aim of this study was to provide parents and practitioners with a realistic foundation for looking at screen versus the impact of other interventions on sleep. “While a relationship between screens and sleep is there, we need to look at research from the lens of what is practically significant,” says Przybylski. “Because the effects of screens are so modest, it is possible that many studies with smaller sample sizes could be false positives – results that support an effect that in reality does not exist.”

“The next step from here is research on the precise mechanisms that link digital screens to sleep. Though technologies and tools relating to so-called ‘blue light’ have been implicated in sleep problems, it is not clear whether play a significant causal role,” says Przybylski. “Screens are here to stay, so transparent, reproducible, and robust research is needed to figure out how tech effects us and how we best intervene to limit its negative effects.”

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The full paper citation is:

Digital Screen Time and Pediatric Sleep: Evidence from a Preregistered Cohort Study by Andrew K. Przybylski, Phd, published in The Journal of Pediatrics

]]>https://theedwire.com/health/childrens-sleep-screens/feed/03151Music improves social communication in autistic childrenhttps://theedwire.com/news/music-autism/
https://theedwire.com/news/music-autism/#respondTue, 06 Nov 2018 07:02:14 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3148Engaging in musical activities such as singing and playing instruments in one-on-one therapy can improve autistic children's social communication skills]]>

Engaging in musical activities such as singing and playing instruments in one-on-one therapy can improve autistic children’s social communication skills, improve their family’s quality of life, as well as increase brain connectivity in key networks, according to researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University.

The link between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and music dates back to the first description of autism, more than 70 years ago, when almost half of those with the disorder were said to possess “perfect pitch.” Since then, there have been many anecdotes about the profound impact music can have on individuals with ASD, yet little strong evidence of its therapeutic benefits.

To get a clearer picture, researchers from UdeM’s International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound (BRAMS) and McGill’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (SCSD) enlisted 51 children with ASD, ages 6 to 12, to participate in a clinical trial involving three months of a music-based intervention.

First, the parents completed questionnaires about their child’s social communication skills and their family’s quality of life, as well as their child’s symptom severity. The children underwent MRI scans to establish a baseline of brain activity.

Children were then randomly assigned to two groups: one involving music and the other not. Each session lasted 45 minutes and was conducted at Westmount Music Therapy.

In the music group, the kids sang and played different musical instruments, working with a therapist to engage in a reciprocal interaction. The control group worked with the same therapist and also engaged in reciprocal play, without any musical activities.

Following the sessions, parents of children in the music group reported significant improvements in their children’s communication skills and family quality life, beyond those reported for the control group. Parents of children in both groups did not report reductions in autism severity.

“These findings are exciting and hold much promise for autism intervention,” said Megha Sharda, a postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal and lead author of the new research, published in Translational Psychiatry.

Data collected from the MRI scans suggest that improved communications skills in children who underwent the music intervention could be a result of increased connectivity between auditory and motor regions of the brain, and decreased connectivity between auditory and visual regions, which are commonly observed to be over-connected in people with autism.

Sharda explains that optimal connectivity between these regions is crucial for integrating sensory stimuli in our environment and are essential for social interaction. For example, when we are communicating with another person, we need to pay attention to what they are saying, plan ahead to know when it is our turn to speak and ignore irrelevant noise. For people with autism, this can often be a challenge.

This is the first clinical trial to show that music intervention for school-age children with autism can lead to improvements in both communication and brain connectivity, and provides a possible neuroscientific explanation for improvements in communication.

“The universal appeal of music makes it globally applicable and can be implemented with relatively few resources on a large scale in multiple settings such as home and school,” said Aparna Nadig, an associate professor at McGill’s SCSD and co-senior author of the study with Krista Hyde, an associate professor of psychology at UdeM.

“Remarkably, our results were observed after only eight to 12 weekly sessions,” said Hyde. “We’ll need to replicate these results with multiple therapists with different degrees of training to evaluate whether the effects persist in larger, real-world settings,” she said.

“Importantly, our study, as well as a recent large-scale clinical trial on music intervention, did not find changes with respect to autism symptoms themselves,” Sharda added. “This may be because we do not have a tool sensitive enough to directly measure changes in social interaction behaviors.” The team is currently developing tools to assess if the improvements in communications skills can also be observed through direct observation of the interaction between child and therapist.

]]>https://theedwire.com/news/music-autism/feed/03148Are children’s television programmes too cool for school?https://theedwire.com/health/children-television/
https://theedwire.com/health/children-television/#respondFri, 02 Nov 2018 07:08:44 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3143New research to be presented at the 2018 American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference & Exhibition looks at how school life is depicted on children's TV shows and what influence it may have on how children perceive school]]>

Television has a large impact on children’s lives; studies have shown that for every 3 hours children spend in school, 5 hours are spent watching TV. While other studies have looked at how television impacts aspects of childhood, such as diet and exercise, little research has been done on how television shapes children’s perceptions of school.

The study abstract, “Too Cool for School: Examining Portrayals of Academics in Children’s Television Programming,” will be presented Saturday, Nov. 3, at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 National Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Fla., documented how academically-focused activities and traits are shown by characters in popular children’s television programmes.

Program ratings were used to identify the 30 most popular children’s TV shows, and two 30-minute episodes of each programme were then picked at random. Researchers examined how the shows portrayed school life and classes, how teachers were portrayed (friendly, mean, willing to help students), how the characters approached school, and stereotypical student depictions (popular, nerdy, rebellious).

Overall attitudes toward school were 46 percent positive and 33 percent negative. Teachers were portrayed in a negative light 33 percent of the time, while 59 percent of students were characterised as either “nerdy-uncool” or “socially-awkward.” Shows targeted to younger viewers tended to show enthusiastic learners with a positive approach to school. But as the recommended viewing age got older, the overall portrayal of school became more negative.

“Television content can have a profound impact on the psychosocial well-being and development of students. We do not want our kids to approach school with fear or be less enthusiastic about their future academic experiences,” said Prithwijit Das, lead researcher at Cohen Children’s Medical in Lake Success, N.Y., “Our hope is that parents, educators, and clinicians can get the conversation going about media awareness and support high-quality television programs that get children excited about learning.”

Since television is pervasive, these types of negative portrayals may have a long-term impact on the way children view their academic experiences and may impact their idea of academics and school for the future, according to the abstract authors. This study highlights the need to advocate for more positive depictions of academics and school in children’s programming, especially as children get older, they said.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed how ‘tech intensity’ can help individuals and business to embrace technology in every part of their life.

Speaking at the Microsoft Future Decoded event at Excel, London, Nadella also acknowledged there are privacy, security and ethical AI issues that need to be addressed by developers and the technology industry as a whole in ensuring that the use of technology is a power for good.

“Privacy is a human right,” he declared. “All of us will have to think about the digital experiences we create to treat privacy as a human right.”

“The challenge of cybersecurity is the damage it causes most impacts citizens and small business and we need to protect them…One of the challenges of AI is that it’s only as good as the data on which its been trained.”

Nadella concluded, “Technology is being diffused at a fast rate but we don’t stop there. Each one of us – in our institutions and organisations – will have to create our own digital capability on top of the technology.”

“Every company is a software company and a digital organisation. It’s this digital formula that will be how we capitalise on this opportunity.”

“So tech intensity is one of the most important strategic formulas to get right – for every business decision-maker in every industry.”

]]>https://theedwire.com/gadedtech/tech-intensity/feed/03139Gender inequality could be driving the deaths of girls under 5https://theedwire.com/health/inequality-deaths/
https://theedwire.com/health/inequality-deaths/#respondWed, 31 Oct 2018 07:28:42 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3136Levels of gender inequality across the world are associated with disproportionate death rates among girls under five years old]]>

Levels of gender inequality across the world are associated with disproportionate death rates among girls under five years old, according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London.

The analysis of data from 195 countries suggests that the unequal treatment of females in society could be interfering with the natural biological advantage they have over males for survival.

Lead researcher Dr Valentina Gallo from Queen Mary University of London said: “The more unequal a society, the more girls are penalised in terms of their survival chances, particularly in lower-middle income countries. Gender inequality then perpetuates itself through the generations via these unfair odds of survival.

“Because of a sexist ideology which values boys over girls, young girls are often at greater risk of mortality through diminished access to health resources, as well as through heightened exposure to health risks. These girls are also further exposed to this risk via their mothers, who may themselves be penalised and valued less than mothers of sons, and less able to provide for their daughters.”

In 2015, a total of 5.9 million children under the age of five years died. More than half of these early deaths were preventable and the result of socio-economic factors and barriers to healthcare. Children are at a greater risk of dying before the age of five if they are born in rural areas, within poor households, or to a mother denied basic education.

Previous studies have shown that greater gender inequality is associated with higher infant mortality, but up until now, it was not known whether boys or girls were more affected.

The study, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, compared countries’ sex-specific under-five mortality rates from the UNICEF database, with their Gender Inequality Index (GII). GII is a measure of gender inequality that takes into account reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status, which varies from a minimum of 0.040 in Switzerland to a maximum of 0.767 in Yemen.

Overall, boys have a slightly higher mortality than girls worldwide, which is thought to be due to a relative biological advantage of girls over boys. However, the study finds that the higher the gender inequality in a country, the more girls would die compared to boys, counteracting the girls’ innate biological advantage.

Explaining some of the reasons behind the disproportionate death rates amongst girls in those countries, the authors draw on examples, such as in India, where girls have lower odds than boys of receiving certain types of health care, including vaccinations, and are vulnerable to female infanticide and circumcision.

The researchers argue that global policy should extend its focus beyond economic development, and work to reduce gender inequality across a variety of domains including reproductive health, political empowerment, educational attainment, and participation in the work force.

A key limitation of the study is the inability to draw firm conclusions on individuals from the aggregated data. Other studies are also needed to show definitive causal links between gender inequality and under five mortality.

]]>https://theedwire.com/health/inequality-deaths/feed/03136Advertising in kids’ apps more prevalent than parents may realisehttps://theedwire.com/gadedtech/advertising-apps/
https://theedwire.com/gadedtech/advertising-apps/#respondTue, 30 Oct 2018 08:02:25 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3128Ninety-five percent of reviewed apps for children ages 5 and under include at least one form of advertising, a new U-M study finds; why parents should pay attention]]>

From games inspired by popular TV shows to digital play labeled as educational, children’s apps continue to explode on smartphones and tablets.

But parents may not realize that while their little ones are learning letters and numbers or enjoying virtual adventures, they’re also likely being targeted by advertisers.

Ninety-five percent of commonly downloaded apps marketed to or played by children ages 5 and under contain at least one type of advertising, according to a new study led by University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

Published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioural Pediatrics, the study reviewed 135 different apps — and it marks the first effort to examine the prevalence of advertising in children’s apps.

Researchers found play was frequently interrupted by pop-up video ads, persuasion by commercial characters to make in-app purchases to enhance the game experience and overt banner ads that could be distracting, misleading and not always age-appropriate.

“With young children now using mobile devices on an average of one hour a day, it’s important to understand how this type of commercial exposure may impact children’s health and well-being,” says senior author Jenny Radesky, M.D., a developmental behavioral expert and pediatrician at Mott.

Radesky notes that her team found high rates of mobile advertising through manipulative and disruptive methods — with exposure to ads even surpassing time spent playing the game in some cases.

“Our findings show that the early childhood app market is a wild west, with a lot of apps appearing more focused on making money than the child’s play experience,” she says. “This has important implications for advertising regulation, the ethics of child app design, as well as how parents discern which children’s apps are worth downloading.”

Ads target youngest players

Researchers detailed experiences with advertisements during gameplay of the most popular children’s apps.

Although 100 percent of surveyed free apps contained advertising content (compared to 88 percent of purchased apps), the ads occurred at similar rates in both types of apps categorized as educational.

Ad videos interrupting play were prevalent in more than a third of all analyzed apps and in more than half of free apps. In-app purchases were also present in a third of all apps, and in 41 percent of all free apps.

This discrepancy worries Radesky: “I’m concerned about digital disparities, as children from lower-income families are more likely to play free apps, which are packed with more distracting and persuasive ads.”

Some ads were particularly deceptive: Familiar commercial characters would appear on-screen to remind players that paying for certain in-app upgrades and purchases would give them access to more appealing options and make the game more fun.

Overt banner ads covering the sides or top and/or bottom of the screen during gameplay were also present in 17 percent of all apps and 27 percent of free apps. Some banners promoted adult-appropriate apps that required a user to watch the full promo before a box could be closed.

Authors note that prior research has found children ages 8 and younger can’t distinguish between media content and advertising — and that fewer regulations apply to advertising in apps than on television — which raises further ethical questions around the practice.

“Commercial influences may negatively impact children’s play and creativity,” Radesky says. “Digital-based advertising is more personalized, on-demand and embedded within interactive mobile devices, and children may think it’s just part of the game.”

Youths’ privacy at risk

Researchers also documented prompts within the apps to share information, most commonly asking players to share their progress or score on social media sites.

While some of the permissions were likely requested to allow certain functions during play, authors point out that collecting data on a child’s location is a potential violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The law, managed by the Federal Trade Commission, was created to protect the privacy of children under 13.

TV advertising regulations also limit commercial breaks during viewing segments, but there are no regulations focused on digital advertising approaches for children.

There is also growing concern among pediatricians and other experts that low-quality content and distracting visual and sound effects in popular apps may not be designed appropriately for children to learn, says Marisa Meyer, the study’s lead author.

That prevalence also diminishes the educational quality of apps, she says.

“We know that time on mobile devices is displacing time children used to spend watching TV,” says Meyer, research assistant at the U-M Medical School. “Parents may view apps that are marketed as educational as harmless and even beneficial to their child’s learning and development.”

The findings, Meyer says, suggest the need for heightened scrutiny of apps in the educational category.

“We hope further research will help us better understand the consequences of digital media advertisement, which hasn’t caught up with the rapid growth of digital media products catered to children,” she says.

Child consumer advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, plan to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about the study’s findings.

]]>https://theedwire.com/gadedtech/advertising-apps/feed/03128Unique patterns of neural communications found in brains of children with autismhttps://theedwire.com/research/neural-brains-autism/
https://theedwire.com/research/neural-brains-autism/#respondThu, 25 Oct 2018 17:25:14 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3124At a time different parts of the brain are supposed to be talking to each other or working together, the communication between different regions of the brain appears to take unexpected exits and detours for no apparent reason.]]>

Think of the brain as a complex transportation hub, a place where neural traffic heads off in any number of directions to make connections while processing something as simple as a mother’s smile.

Now consider the same center in a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). At a time different parts of the brain are supposed to be talking to each other or working together, this traffic–the communication between different regions of the brain–takes unexpected exits and detours for no apparent reason.

A team of San Diego State University researchers, studying MRI scans of school-age children’s brains, found just such unique patterns of neural communication involving the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for processing social information. In children with ASDs, the amygdala connections with other parts of the brain proved to be weaker with some regions –and stronger with others–when compared with typically developing children of the same age.

A region of the brain showing marked differences connecting with the amygdala was the occipital cortex, located in the rear of the brain. It is involved in encoding facial expressions, gaze and other facial cues, said SDSU psychologist Inna Fishman, who led research.

The findings point to possible brain “markers” for autism spectrum disorders to further characterize the condition in biological and not just behavioral terms. Fishman said such markers could potentially become a tool in identifying autism in children with this developmental disorder, which can impair social communication and interaction.

“The patterns of amygdala connections are very unique in autism,” said Fishman. “What we found is not necessarily something I would predict. We measured connections of the amygdala with the entire brain, and the findings with the visual cortex kind of surprised me.”

Fishman, co-author Ralph-Axel Müller, along with colleagues contributing to the research, published their results in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Fishman is founding director of the SDSU Center for Autism, an interdisciplinary group of researchers and clinical scientists from multiple SDSU colleges and departments. Müller is director of SDSU’s Brain Development Imaging Laboratories. The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Results were based on brain imaging from 55 children, aged 7 to 17, identified with ASDs and compared with 55 typically developing children of the same age.

The functional MRI used in the research measures how brain activity changes over time–in this case, a period of six minutes. It provides a picture of ongoing communication between different brain regions, known as “functional connectivity,” showing how synchronized the amygdala’s activity is with other brain areas.

The MRIs revealed weaker connections between the amygdala and the occipital cortex, Fishman said. In addition, the MRIs showed that the expected strengthening of connections between amygdala and the frontal cortex that takes place during adolescence in typically developing youth was entirely absent in the ASD participants.

This absence of a continuing brain maturation associated with typical adolescence could contribute to the social communication difficulties experienced by those with ASDs as they reach their teenage years and young adulthood, Fishman said.

Fishman emphasized there may be some form of disrupted coordination between the amygdala and other points in the brain, though it’s not yet possible to say whether this causes any of the differences in social functioning seen in children with ASDs.

That’s partly because of the age of the children in the study. “Having scanned kids who are 10, 12 or 14 years old, and having found differences at this age doesn’t allow us to make inferences about what might have caused these differences to emerge in the first place,” she said. “By that point, the connections in the brain are formed and already quite established.”

As a follow-up, Fishman is studying brain connectivity and organization in toddlers and preschoolers with ASDs, when their autism symptoms first manifest. She hopes to learn more about whether the early behaviors seen in children with ASDs lead to the atypical connection patters or the other way around.

Overall, understanding the biology behind ASDs “brings us closer, incrementally” to improved clinical decisions concerning diagnosis or prognosis of ASDs, and possibly to more targeted, tailored interventions focusing on specific brain circuits based on the level of unique brain connections identified in the brain, Fishman said.

]]>https://theedwire.com/research/neural-brains-autism/feed/03124Study reveals how the brain overcomes its own limitationshttps://theedwire.com/science/brain-limitations/
https://theedwire.com/science/brain-limitations/#respondWed, 24 Oct 2018 09:31:30 +0000https://theedwire.com/?p=3122Strategies to compensate for uncertainty help the brain succeed at difficult mental computations]]>

Imagine trying to write your name so that it can be read in a mirror. Your brain has all of the visual information you need, and you’re a pro at writing your own name. Still, this task is very difficult for most people. That’s because it requires the brain to perform a mental transformation that it’s not familiar with: using what it sees in the mirror to accurately guide your hand to write backward.

MIT neuroscientists have now discovered how the brain tries to compensate for its poor performance in tasks that require this kind of complicated transformation. As it also does in other types of situations where it has little confidence in its own judgments, the brain attempts to overcome its difficulties by relying on previous experiences.

“If you’re doing something that requires a harder mental transformation, and therefore creates more uncertainty and more variability, you rely on your prior beliefs and bias yourself toward what you know how to do well, in order to compensate for that variability,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

This strategy actually improves overall performance, the researchers report in their study, which appears in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Nature Communications. Evan Remington, a McGovern Institute postdoc, is the paper’s lead author, and technical assistant Tiffany Parks is also an author on the paper.

Noisy computations

Neuroscientists have known for many decades that the brain does not faithfully reproduce exactly what the eyes see or what the ears hear. Instead, there is a great deal of “noise” — random fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain, which can come from uncertainty or ambiguity about what we are seeing or hearing. This uncertainty also comes into play in social interactions, as we try to interpret the motivations of other people, or when recalling memories of past events.

Previous research has revealed many strategies that help the brain to compensate for this uncertainty. Using a framework known as Bayesian integration, the brain combines multiple, potentially conflicting pieces of information and values them according to their reliability. For example, if given information by two sources, we’ll rely more on the one that we believe to be more credible.

In other cases, such as making movements when we’re uncertain exactly how to proceed, the brain will rely on an average of its past experiences. For example, when reaching for a light switch in a dark, unfamiliar room, we’ll move our hand toward a certain height and close to the doorframe, where past experience suggests a light switch might be located.

All of these strategies have been previously shown to work together to increase bias toward a particular outcome, which makes our overall performance better because it reduces variability, Jazayeri says.

Noise can also occur in the mental conversion of sensory information into a motor plan. In many cases, this is a straightforward task in which noise plays a minimal role — for example, reaching for a mug that you can see on your desk. However, for other tasks, such as the mirror-writing exercise, this conversion is much more complicated.

“Your performance will be variable, and it’s not because you don’t know where your hand is, and it’s not because you don’t know where the image is,” Jazayeri says. “It involves an entirely different form of uncertainty, which has to do with processing information. The act of performing mental transformations of information clearly induces variability.”

That type of mental conversion is what the researchers set out to explore in the new study. To do that, they asked subjects to perform three different tasks. For each one, they compared subjects’ performance in a version of the task where mapping sensory information to motor commands was easy, and a version where an extra mental transformation was required.

In one example, the researchers first asked participants to draw a line the same length as a line they were shown, which was always between 5 and 10 centimeters. In the more difficult version, they were asked to draw a line 1.5 times longer than the original line.

The results from this set of experiments, as well as the other two tasks, showed that in the version that required difficult mental transformations, people altered their performance using the same strategies that they use to overcome noise in sensory perception and other realms. For example, in the line-drawing task, in which the participants had to draw lines ranging from 7.5 to 15 centimeters, depending on the length of the original line, they tended to draw lines that were closer to the average length of all the lines they had previously drawn. This made their responses overall less variable and also more accurate.

“This regression to the mean is a very common strategy for making performance better when there is uncertainty,” Jazayeri says.

Noise reduction

The new findings led the researchers to hypothesize that when people get very good at a task that requires complex computation, the noise will become smaller and less detrimental to overall performance. That is, people will trust their computations more and stop relying on averages.

“As it gets easier, our prediction is the bias will go away, because that computation is no longer a noisy computation,” Jazayeri says. “You believe in the computation; you know the computation is working well.”

The researchers now plan to further study whether people’s biases decrease as they learn to perform a complicated task better. In the experiments they performed for the Nature Communications study, they found some preliminary evidence that trained musicians performed better in a task that involved producing time intervals of a specific duration.

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The research was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, the Simons Foundation, the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, and the McGovern Institute.